Atlas Shrugged

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 Nobody but their friends and trade associates noticed that three orange growers in California went out
of business, as well as two lettuce farmers in Imperial Valley; nobody noticed the closing of a commission
house in New York, of a plumbing company to which the commission house owed money, of a lead-pipe
wholesaler who had supplied the plumbing company. When people were starving, said the newspapers,
one did not have to feel concern over the failures of business enterprises which were only private
ventures for private profit.
The coal shipped across the Atlantic by the Bureau of Global Relief did not reach the People's State of
England: it was seized by Ragnar Danneskjold.
The second time that Danagger Coal was late in delivering fuel to Taggart Transcontinental, in
mid-January, Danagger's cousin snarled over the telephone that he could not help it: his mines had been
shut down for three days, due to a shortage of lubricating oil for the machinery. The supply of coal to
Taggart Transcontinental was four days late.
Mr. Quinn, of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company which had once moved from Connecticut to Colorado,
waited a week for the freight train that carried his order of Rearden steel. When the train arrived, the
doors of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company's plant were closed.
Nobody traced the closing of a motor company in Michigan, that had waited for a shipment of ball
bearings, its machinery idle, its workers on full pay; or the closing of a sawmill in Oregon, that had waited
for a new motor; or the closing of a lumber yard in Iowa, left without supply; or the bankruptcy of a
building contractor in Illinois who, failing to get his lumber on time, found his contracts cancelled and the
purchasers of his homes sent wandering off down snowswept roads in search of that which did not exist
anywhere any longer.
The snowstorm that came at the end of January blocked the passes through the Rocky Mountains,
raising white walls thirty feet high across the main-line track of Taggart Transcontinental. The men who
attempted to clear the track, gave up within the first few hours: the rotary plows broke down, one after
another. The plows had been kept in precarious repair for two years past the span of their usefulness.
The new plows had not been delivered; the manufacturer had quit, unable to obtain the steel he needed
from Orren Boyle.
Three westbound trains were trapped on the sidings of Winston Station, high in the Rockies, where the
main line of Taggart Transcontinental cut across the northwest corner of Colorado. For five days, they
remained beyond the reach of help. Trains could not approach them through the storm. The last of the
trucks made by Lawrence Hammond broke down on the frozen grades of the mountain highways.
The best of the airplanes once made by Dwight Sanders were sent out, but never reached Winston
Station; they were worn past the stage of fighting a storm.
Through the driving mesh of snow, the passengers trapped aboard the trains looked out at the lights of
Winston's shanties. The lights died in the night of the second day. By the evening of the third, the lights,
the heat and the food had given out aboard the trains. In the brief lulls of the storm, when the white mesh
vanished and left behind it the stillness of a black void merging a lightless earth with a starless sky—the
passengers could see, many miles away to the south, a small tongue of flame twisting in the wind. It was
Wyatt's Torch.
By the morning of the sixth day, when the trains were able to move and proceeded down the slopes of
Utah, of Nevada, of California, the trainmen observed the smokeless stacks and the closed doors of
small trackside factories, which had not been closed on their last run.